 Welcome to JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Jamie Scato-Gattaya of JSA here at telecom exchange New York City, 2018 with my friend Mr. Bill LaPerche, the executive chairman of Highland. Bill, welcome to JSA TV. It's great to be here. Thank you very much. We are honored. You are certainly a visionary in our industry. It's really wonderful to have you here in the hot seat, if you will. And congratulations as well. This is your second anniversary with Highland as the executive chairman there. So can you tell us what's in store for us? Sure. Highland's a great team. It was a result of me talking to a couple of private equity guys and trying to figure out in the industry what's next. And we said, you know, there's a lot of stuff going on, but the constant thing is we're always building. So Highland is a communications infrastructure builder that specializes in building in the greater New York area. And we're going to use that as a platform to expand that across the United States over the next three or four years. And certainly you have the resume to prove that you've done this before. You can do it again. So what differentiates Highland Datacom and Electric from other similar providers? You know, people want me to say cost and price, but that's not really it. It's execution. It's that locally savvy, smart team that knows how to build in a place like New York. As you can imagine, with all the permitting you need, with all the government regulations, with all the challenges of working in New York, you need people that know how to do that. So the Highland team executes. They probably are not the lowest priced alternative in New York, but they're the one that gets the job done. Yeah, there are certainly a lot of regulations here in New York City, a lot of union issues and to be able to get all the governing bodies, if you will, to work with you to get the job done. That is a talent that is very rare indeed, particularly in the city. So congratulations there. Thank you. So recently Highland announced it has expanded into other cities, not just here in New York City. We've got Philly and Baltimore. Why those cities and what can we expect? Well, Jamie, we looked at how do we take our special sauce, our ability to get things done and bring that to other cities. The strategy is based on the idea that we are looking for locally savvy companies in these other cities and looking to acquire them and bring some of Highland's special sauce, their back office knowledge, their ability to get permits, their knowledge of the construction industry. We're going to bring that all to them and use that to deploy in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Most importantly in Philadelphia and Baltimore, however, is we have customers that want us there. Because of the job we've done for them in New York, we've had customers asking us to go to their pain points and right now that's Philadelphia and Baltimore. So we've deployed down there with some anchor customers which is a great way to start. And looking towards the future, the future is certainly bright. We have so many technologies that are coming up and making Highland even more needed. So can we talk about 5G deployments and networking for smart cities? How does Highland have a role there? So that's the really exciting stuff, Jamie. People talk about 5G and they talk about IoT, but it all goes back to one thing and that's fiber density. We know how much Verizon is going to spend, over $40 billion over the next two or three years. AT&T is going to spend a lot of money deploying FirstNet and their 5G network as well. So while Internet of Things and 5G are the drivers, it's really about fiber densification for us. And we see statistics that when fully deployed in New York City, you might need a 5G node every 200 meters or every other floor of a skyscraper. So just think about the amount of stuff that needs to get built if you do that. There's no question. Bandwidth is just as important these days as good quality air and water. So where do you see Highland going in the next three to five years from now? So as I said earlier, Highland is in three basic businesses. We have our wire line business. We still have cable companies and telcos deploying lots and lots of fiber, so we're good at that. We're in the wireless business. As that 5G network I just spoke about gets deployed. Great customers like Crown Castle and Externet and Mobility are building out infrastructure that's just mind-boggling. For instance, last year alone, Verizon put a 5G node on every single intersection in Manhattan, all 3,300 of them. So that wireless business is going great for us. The third bucket we call our municipal business is really that Internet of Things communications infrastructure. It is the Link New York City kiosk you see here, which would be deployed now in Philadelphia at bus stations in Chicago at bus stations as well. It's the easy pass. It's all this sensor-driven stuff that we heard about this morning at your great forum here that's creating this Internet of Things infrastructure that's going to be needed to be built out. So Highland is looking for companies that can do that. And we're going to look for those companies that are locally savvy, that have great relationships with the cities and towns they work in so they can get the necessary permits and whose customers trust them. So over the next three to five years, you can look for us to look for companies like that and build a great platform. Certainly sounds like a recipe for success, one that you've written before as the former CEO of Course of AboveNet. And where can folks go to find out more information on Highland? Well, you can go to highland.com, which is our website, and we've recently revamped it to be more informative. You can give us a call. We're happy to talk about this kind of stuff. We're very excited about building out this infrastructure and we're building a great team to do it. We've made two acquisitions already. We have two more in the very near term, meaning probably by the end of the month and we have two or three on the horizon for over the summer. So lots of stuff going on to be very excited about. There you have it, Highland on a tier. Check them out, highland.com. Thank you Bill for your time here. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV.